Page 13 of One-Track Pride

"You realize," I say slowly, "that I could end your family with what I know. One story. Sources, a derailment tied to a land grab, and buried in it, the reason nobody can develop the Shaw mountain. It would be the biggest thing ever."

"I've known since the day you stepped off the platform." He spreads his hands, and there's no plea in it, just fact. "I'm not going to threaten you into silence. I couldn't stomach it, and it wouldn't work on you anyway. I'm telling you what we are and trusting you with it, because you already earned it, and because the alternative is treating you like the enemy. I won't do that."

He just handed me the loaded gun and stepped back from it, either the most naive thing I've ever seen or the bravest.

"I'm not writing it." The words are out before I've fully decided, and once they're in the air I mean them. "Not the mountain, not what you are. That's not a story, it's a family, and I don't burn families to grow myself. I settled that math on a different case, and I'm not redoing it now."

He eases, a tension I hadn't clocked until it left. "You didn't have to say that."

"I'm aware." I close half the distance I set between us, because I'm done using it. "The rest, the leak, Northstar, Warren, whoever hired men to blow a pass with people on the train, that I am writing. They tried to murder people on a train to close a railway. I will end them on the record and enjoy it."

"On that, you'll have every Shaw at your back." A ghost of a smile. "We're good in a fight, uou may have noticed."

"I noticed, yes." I let a beat of the old dryness back in, because we both need it. Then it fades, because there's one more thing I have to say and no clever way in. "I kissed you before I knew. I want you to know that still counts, I'm not taking it back because the man attached to it turned out to be more than advertised."

He gazes at me like I've handed him something he didn't dare ask for. "It counts," he says quietly. "It counts a great deal."

Behind us Amy calls his name across the snow, evac sleds inbound, the night's work nowhere near done. I step back to let him go be who he is out here, the one everybody runs toward. But I catch his sleeve first to make him look at me.

"Ten minutes turned into everything," I say. "Good. Don't make me chase anything else. No more careful."

"Okay," he agrees, and this time I believe it.

10

EVANDER

Camille calls it before we're even far from the wreck. She spends twenty minutes on her knees with a flashlight while I load the last sled, and when she stands, her verdict comes out flat and certain.

"The blast came from above, not below." She sweeps the beam up the slope toward a black shoulder of rock. "A derailment starts under the wheels. This started over our heads. See how the debris fans downhill from one point? Trains don't throw rock uphill, and mountains don't detonate on a schedule. Somebody put a charge up there and let the snow do the attach."

"Then that's where we go," I say, and I don't argue about her coming.

The climb takes us above the tree line, where the wind has a freezing temperature. Camille moves ahead with her light, breathing hard, and the animal in me reads the air like it wants to. No hiding it, no shame in it. It's a tool now, the same as her light.

"You're doing it," she says, watching me over her shoulder. "The head-tilt. What are you getting?"

"Diesel where there shouldn't be any. A chemical under it, sharp, manufactured." I turn a slow half-circle and lock onto the thread. "Uphill and east, it runs straight to that overhang."

"So the nose tells you the direction and I tell you the physics." She almost grins, hazel eyes bright with cold and interest instead of suspicion. "We're going to be insufferable together."

We reach the shoulder, and I see the scar before she does, a burn seared into the underside of the rock, snow around it glazed hard from heat that came and went in a heartbeat. She throws an arm across my chest out of instinct, though we both know it wouldn't hold me.

"Don't step past me. Look." She crouches and lifts a twist of bright metal on the end of her pen, turning it. "Machined casing, directional. You don't buy this and you don't set it by accident. Somebody stood right here and chose this exact spot, because one shaped charge does what a hundred failed couplings never could."

"They wanted the mountain to be the weapon," I say. "So the mountain takes the blame."

"And the storm." She bags the fragment with hands that don't shake, which unsettles me more than steadiness has a right to. "A slide in a blizzard is a tragedy nobody questions. A bomb is a headline, they picked tragedy on purpose."

The wind shifts, and the lion catches it before my ears do, a low groan running through the snowpack above us, the sound of something enormous deciding to let go. I have her against my chest and three strides downhill before her flashlight leaves her hand, a boulder and the slide between us, my arm caged over her head while the roar swallows every other sound. When it settles she doesn't pull away. She tips her face up, snow in her lashes, and laughs.

"All right," she says. "That one I'll allow. The lion thing has its uses."

"You almost got buried."

"I almost got carried. There's a difference, and it's flattering." Her breath is still fast, her fists still knotted in my jacket. "You did that uphill without so much as a grunt. Do you understand how annoying that is to a woman who prides herself on not needing rescuing?"

A rough laugh scrapes out of me before I catch it, and God, I needed it. I set her down but keep a hand at her waist, and we don’t hurry to end it.